The Japanese Wikinews has reached 500 published articles. Half of its stories treat Japan related news, and seven of those are original reports including some translations. Most covered areas are Japan, Asia and Europe. Most favored topics are "Society related" (Crimes, Accidents, Events or any other human interest), Politics, Weather and climates and Sports. 237 registered users participate in including seven sysops, and currently some 10 users are active.

The Vietnamese Wikipedia now has well over 2,000 registered users, thanks in large part to an article published today in the Vietnamese newspaper Tuổi Trẻ that features comments by several prominent contributors at the Vietnamese Wikipedia, which reached its 1,000th registered user less than two months ago. [3] The milestone user is HarryNg.

The new Yahoo!-hosted server farm in Seoul [yaseo] is now in the process of being commissioned by Wikimedia's tireless developer team. [4] When up and running, the Seoul system will be the Wikimedia Foundation's fourth active server farm, adding to the current server farms in Tampa, Paris, and Amsterdam.

The First Annual Polish Wikimedia Meetup is held in Cracow on 13/14 August 2005. One of attendees is Tim Shell from the WMF Board. Creation of another local chapter - Wikimedia Polska is on the agenda.

The English Wikiquote has reached 4,000 articles. The 4,000th article is by Thomas A. Bailey, an American historian. There are 10 sysops, from around 4,200 registered users. Half of the submissions are posted anonymously. The current trend is to contribute quotes from TV shows and movies.

Khalid of Saudi Arabia reports that the block on English Wikipedia in that country has been lifted. The block was first announced this past Saturday, June 25, though no reason was given for it. Information was passed on to Internet access monitors in the US, and Khalid wrote a letter to the authorities in Saudi Arabia, requesting that the block be lifted in consideration of Wikipedia's NPOV policy toward politics and religion.

Several projects have now been upgraded to use the new MediaWiki 1.5 software. The conversion of the English-language Wikipedia is now in progress. Because of its size, this is expected to be the single largest conversion task, and to take hours or days to run. Other languages and projects continue to be available as normal.

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The MediaWiki 1.5 upgrade has now started: Wikipedia projects will be converted one-by-one, with each sub-project being locked read-only whilst it is converted. During this process, other projects will be available as normal.

The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles. This Wikipedia is the first Austronesian language wikipedia which has reached the 10,000 barrier. This is noteworthy as the word "wiki" in Wikipedia, Wikimedia etc, is an Austronesian word.

Википеди, the Ossetian Wikipedia, has reached 1,000 articles. Unfortunately, Bug 1688, which prevents MediaWiki from recognizing interwiki links to the Ossetian Wikipedia, is still evident at Meta, although it has been fixed at Wikipedia.

The Javanese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. The 1,000th article is Kakawin Ramayana, about the Old Javanese rendering of Ramayana. Ramayana is one of the two great epics from India. Furthermore we now have 65 registered users.

Wikipedia Tiếng Việt, the Vietnamese Wikipedia, now has more than 1,000 articles. The 1,000th article was Trung tử (centriole), by Cao Xuân Hiếu. In celebration, the Vietnamese Wikipedia community unveiled its new front page design today. The project to create this new design, which itself went through three redesigns before reaching the current version, is nearly as old as the wiki itself, dating back to December 2003. Suggestions for improving the design are still welcome as always.

Wikipedia's Alexa rank continues to climb. Today it reached a weekly average rank of 76, with a daily rank of 56.

The Georgian Wikipedia has reached 500 articles, less than a month after gaining its 100 articles. The most recent Wikipedia to reach 500 articles prior to the Georgian was the Armenian Wikipedia, earlier this month; these two together constitute the first languages from the Caucasus region and the first from the non-European languages of the former Soviet Union.

Wiktionary Tiếng Việt, the Vietnamese Wiktionary, has finally reached 100 entries with tình bạn (friendship), written by David, who has probably written more articles than anyone else at the Vietnamese Wiktionary thus far.

The Norwegian Wikipedia at no: decides by a democratic vote to go from being a common Wikipedia for both official written forms of Norwegian, to using exclusively the bokmål/riksmål form. Norwegian articles written in nynorsk henceforth belong only at nn:, and (at least for a while) the Wikipedia prefixes nb: and no: will be synonyms.

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Number of articles in wikipedia's database totals more than 1,6 millions.

Wikipedia Tiếng Việt, the Vietnamese Wikipedia, now has over 500 articles. Article number 500 was probably Vật lý thực nghiệm (Experimental physics), written by Trần Thế Trung, the same user who wrote article 400 a week and a half ago. In less than a month the Vietnamese Wikipedians have created almost 200 new articles, a stark departure from the linear growth pattern that the project has exhibited for more than a year.

The project namespace (ns:4) and site name of the portuguese Wikinews is changed from Wikinews to Wikinotícias.

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The English Wikinews edition has reached 1,000 pages in the main namespace, most of them articles. At the same time, the 10th article including original reporting has been published (see Erik's summary of the progress on original reporting so far).

A major power failure at the colocation centre where Wikimedia's main servers are hosted crashes all the Wikimedia servers. Several database servers were corrupted. Fortunately, one server had intact data, and, after replaying transaction logs, all or almost all data was salvaged from the crash. After many hours of total downtime, Wikimedia was later brought up in read-only mode. Full operation is expected to commence within 24 hours.

The Hebrew Wikipedia received today an Honor Certificate from the Israeli Internet Society and the National Society for Volunteering in Israel, in honor of its voluntary activity in the Internet for the benefit of man and society. You can see it here, it's in Hebrew. Everybody who contribute to the advancement of Wikipedia in general should see himself as being honored. David Shay 18:42, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)